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[Hurricanes/Tropical Storms] - Katia turns away, Nate in Mexico, Maria in Atlantic
Shadowfire
Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
Vermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered User regular
This man is still a super hero.
So this thread is now the Hurricane thread. Irene hit the northeast pretty hard, but I haven't heard a whole lot about Lee at this point. We also have a few other storms we have been watching (or should be):
TS Nate formed in the gulf, much like Lee did, and is heading right into Mexico now. They're concerned that this could strengthen quickly thanks to the warm gulf water, but right now it is still a tropical storm.
TS Maria is one to watch. It's out in the Atlantic, near the Western Antilles/Puerto Rico, and it's too early to tell if it will hit the U.S. Also, plenty of time to strengthen into hurricane status.
Katia was being very closely watched by the Northeast. All we needed was another hit by a hurricane, but it looks like Katia decided to just hang out in the pool.
Old OP:
So, Irene is a thing that happened. Lots of people all around the country laughed and said what a "nothing" storm it was, how it petered out, did nothing...
This policeman from Rockingham is delivering medication on Sunday to a person in need. Why on horseback? Because the bridge and roads into town were destroyed, and because he is a fucking superhero. And this is before the worst of the flooding really hit. Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel was the first to really talk about it on national TV, as far as I can tell, and that seems to be only because he grew up here (in a neighboring town).
Pictures to get an idea of what happened here in Vermont:
Things are steadily improving, but by "improving" I mean "the water level is lowering, some places a lot, some only slightly"
We have a number of communities who are cut off from the rest of the state, with their only way in or out via ATV, horse, or helicopter (last I checked was around 6, originally it was 13).
This policeman from Rockingham is delivering medication on Sunday to a person in need. Why on horseback? Because the bridge and roads into town were destroyed, and because he is a fucking superhero. And this is before the worst of the flooding really hit. Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel was the first to really talk about it on national TV, as far as I can tell, and that seems to be only because he grew up here (in a neighboring town).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1n5nES_RPAPictures to get an idea of what happened here in Vermont:
Chester
Groton
Killington
Lower Bartonsville, something is wrong with this covered bridge.
Quechee. This covered bridge is about 1/3 gone, and is only being held in place now by a pipe holding power and cable lines.
Waitsfield
Wilmington
Jamaica, at the Emergency Command Center for the state. Needless to say, that moved.
Rt. 4 in Mendon
Woodford
Windsor (this is right by my house. Normally there is about 30' between the bridge and the water. My wife and I were very close to evacuating).
Castleton State College
The plaza I used to work at. There is a Gamestop about a hundred feet to the left of the edge of that picture. It's closed for a couple months or so. The Kohl's there will be closed for the same amount of time they say, but probably more since the foundation has shifted. Penney's will not reopen, nor will some other stores there.
Groton
Killington
Lower Bartonsville, something is wrong with this covered bridge.
Quechee. This covered bridge is about 1/3 gone, and is only being held in place now by a pipe holding power and cable lines.
Waitsfield
Wilmington
Jamaica, at the Emergency Command Center for the state. Needless to say, that moved.
Rt. 4 in Mendon
Woodford
Windsor (this is right by my house. Normally there is about 30' between the bridge and the water. My wife and I were very close to evacuating).
Castleton State College
The plaza I used to work at. There is a Gamestop about a hundred feet to the left of the edge of that picture. It's closed for a couple months or so. The Kohl's there will be closed for the same amount of time they say, but probably more since the foundation has shifted. Penney's will not reopen, nor will some other stores there.
Things are steadily improving, but by "improving" I mean "the water level is lowering, some places a lot, some only slightly"
Thursday: VTrans workers in North Clarendon trapped by a flash flood. They were lifted out by helicopter.
Rt 107 from Bethel to Rutland
Bridge to Royalton
Rt 107 from Bethel to Rutland
Bridge to Royalton
We have a number of communities who are cut off from the rest of the state, with their only way in or out via ATV, horse, or helicopter (last I checked was around 6, originally it was 13).
So, why make this thread? Partly because I needed to get this out in the open. There was a tad bit of surprise when I posted some of the above pictures in the Primary thread, and I think people need to see (and it will make me feel a lot better talking about it). Still, there is plenty to discuss. First, I'm going to reserve the second post for pictures from others in the thread. I can't be the only one affected, and I don't just mean Vermont. If you're in New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, or wherever, and your area was affected, please post pictures and I'll repost them in the second post.
As for what else can be discussed, there's the media calling this "nothing" while the state scrambles to save lives and evacuate the people who coordinate disaster relief. We can also discuss FEMA, and the way Republicans (seemingly led by Eric Cantor) want to withhold aid to places hit by recent tragedy (or not so recent, i.e. Joplin).
Discuss.
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the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Check out my art! Buy some prints!
Feral references poster that hasn't been around for over a year.
Yeah, this hurricane sucks. Guess I hope the gubbmint does its job.
but they're listening to every word I say
I put a lot of work in that list, I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
One of our shows is a guest panel show. One of the people actually said, while saying how FEMA isn't really necessary, "they got 10 inches of rain in some places, but not in all the places. We got 5 inches of rain last Monday. Where's our FEMA response?" It was all I could do to just not cut away from him and refuse to give him any more close-ups for the rest of the show.
I mean, yeah, we got fucked by flooding here too, but that was a threat that we watched develop over MONTHS. The Northeast got how much warning? A week and a half? Less? And they got the water along with 100 mph winds?
Fucking people and their lack of perspective.
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Here are some pictures. My town got buttfucked so hard.
So many people I know were like "pft, Irene was no big deal"...
Edit:
Here are a couple of videos:
A local fire fighter made this one
This is our local baseball field...
Yup. No biggie at all. It's cool.
Check out my art! Buy some prints!
Stay strong, guys. Clean up as best as you can and keep working. From experience it will take a good long while, but if you start in your backyard and keep going eventually the area will be cleaned up and life goes on.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
Really hope Katia decides to stay out in the Atlantic and off the coast.
i watched the storm coverage consistently (over the internets cause i'm in new zealand now) and fretted over my parents and friends all up and down the east coast. but they've been lucky.
my heart and thoughts go out to you guys. seriously.
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Rough estimate? 5 ft of water there. Her house needs to be torn down. It is uninhabitable.
http://www.njtransit.com/var/var_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=HurricaneIreneTo
And of course my line is the most damaged, with repairs scheduled to take "months".
Edit: Pics 4 and 5 are on my line. So.....yeah.
Its horrible.
I told my mom to tell me as soon as I can fly up there to help clean/demo/whatever. I'm more than a thousand miles away right now and all I can do is write about this on the Internet.
Not if Eric Cantor has his way.
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If it has, it came from the Joplin recovery.
I really feel bad for VT, too. If people don't want to give aid to people who built a house on the beach and didn't get insurance, I'm fine with that.
If anyone who thinks aid shouldn't go to people without flood insurance in a state that NEVER FLOODS they should be taken out to the middle of a lake, dropped in it, then have their house dropped in on top of them.
If you're thinking about this, there is a site set up for people who are looking to volunteer (and those who are offering to help). It's been a great resource so far, but it's just one. The red cross is operating here, all of the food shelves, temporary housing organizations.. even the humane societies are looking for help.
Also, the first company I've heard of so far bringing in aid? Proctor and Gamble is delivering 40,000 pounds of Iams cat and dog foods to the Vermont humane society. :^:
This is correct, and it's all used for emergency relief. Otherwise, the President has promised to cover 75% of the rebuilding costs with federal funds, but again, Cantor may hold that up. Because he is a cock.
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I wasn't even thinking of flying into Vermont. My mom lives in Connecticut and I want to help her sort through her life. Its kind of the the worst month ever for her.
But now I want to fly to Vermont. Part of me is yelling that this shouldn't even cost money. It should just happen. Rebuild a town. Labor, materials, why should it cost anything? Just give give give. Its a fucking catastrophe, we should be able to do this without making a profit. I've already suggested my mother open up her rental house in Vermont that luckily did not get destroyed) to displaced locals for free. I think she is going to.
is that really the Westboro Baptist Church's website?
Because if it is, they're trolling Vermont hard...
And by trolling, I mean "being dicks."
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Rage
wait that's the opposite of great
A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America’s financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama. Now he’s doing it again, this time over disaster relief, making headlines by insisting that any federal aid to the victims of Hurricane Irene be offset by cuts in other spending. In effect, he is threatening to take Irene’s victims hostage.
Mr. Cantor’s critics have been quick to accuse him of hypocrisy, and with good reason. After all, he and his Republican colleagues showed no comparable interest in paying for the Bush administration’s huge unfunded initiatives. In particular, they did nothing to offset the cost of the Iraq war, which now stands at $800 billion and counting.
And it turns out that in 2004, when his home state of Virginia was struck by Tropical Storm Gaston, Mr. Cantor voted against a bill that would have required the same pay-as-you-go rule that he now advocates.
But, as I see it, hypocrisy is a secondary issue here. The primary issue should be the extraordinary nihilism now on display by Mr. Cantor and his colleagues — their willingness to flout all the usual conventions of fair play and, well, decency in order to get what they want.
Not long ago, a political party seeking to change U.S. policy would try to achieve that goal by building popular support for its ideas, then implementing those ideas through legislation. That, after all, is how our political system was designed to work.
But today’s G.O.P. has decided to bypass all that and go for a quicker route. Never mind getting enough votes to pass legislation; it gets what it wants by threatening to hurt America if its demands aren’t met. That’s what happened with the debt-ceiling fight, and now it’s what’s happening over disaster aid. In effect, Mr. Cantor and his allies are threatening to take hurricane victims hostage, using their suffering as a bargaining chip.
Of course, Mr. Cantor would have you believe that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. But that’s no more than a cover story.
Should disaster aid, as a matter of sound public finance, be offset by immediate cuts in other spending? No. The time-honored principle, backed by economists right and left, is that temporary bursts of spending — which usually arise when there’s a war to fight, but can also arise from other causes, including financial crises and natural disasters — are a good reason to run temporary budget deficits. Rather than imposing sharp cuts in other spending or sharply raising taxes, governments can and should spread the burden over time, borrowing now and repaying gradually via a combination of lower spending and higher taxes.
But can the U.S. government borrow to pay for disaster aid? Isn’t the government broke? Yes, it can, and, no, it isn’t. America has a long-run deficit problem, which should be met with long-run budget measures. But it’s having no problem at all borrowing to pay for current expenses. Moreover, it’s able to borrow funds at extremely low interest rates. Notably, right now the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year U.S. government bond is only slightly more than half what it was in 2004 when Mr. Cantor felt that it wasn’t necessary to pay for disaster relief.
So the claim that fiscal responsibility requires immediate spending cuts to offset the cost of disaster relief is just wrong, in both theory and practice. As I said, it’s just a cover story for the real game being played here.
Now, Mr. Cantor may end up backing down on this one, if only because several of the hard-hit states have Republican governors, who want and need aid soon, without strings attached. But that won’t put an end to the larger issue: What will happen to America now that people like Mr. Cantor are calling the shots for one of its two major political parties?
And, yes, I mean one of our parties. There are plenty of bad things to be said about the Democrats, who have their fair share of cynics and careerists. There may even be Democrats in Congress who would be as willing as Mr. Cantor to advance their goals through sabotage and blackmail (although I can’t think of any). But, if they exist, they aren’t in important leadership positions. Mr. Cantor is. And that should worry anyone who cares about our nation’s future.
It'll be great when calling Cantor out on this stuff will be "dancing on graves", although I suppose that'd entail acknowledging some damage was done in the first place. Hargle bargle.
Needless to say, I feel for you guys, I saw some pictures where trees fell on houses and shit, thats bad.
I hope the locals drown the fuckers.
Welcome to the tornadoes or the in the South this year or hell the seemingly almost annual flooding across the country. Shit even the BP spill coverage was mostly "What whacky plan will those nutty guys try next!?" when it should have been "This shit is catastophically bad" 24/7.
The 24 hour news is kind of a joke when it comes to things like this.
At least Cantor got some "Is this guy fucking serious?" coverage for his (not the first time) we have to offset any FEMA funding with budget cuts shit. I mean, not enough coverage but with the state of our national media I'll take what I can get.
Yeah, we were without power for half a week, but we were lucky enough to have a good generator (and after this week, I've decided that it's not something I'm willing to live without again if at all possible). The timing sucked for me because my propane was low and I had to be very careful about running it only as much as needed to keep the refrigerators & freezers at safe temperatures, but we were able to do it (barely). And there are still LOTS of people in the area without power today, when we've had it back since Wednesday afternoon. We also live out where it's entirely possible to cook over a campfire every night if it's not raining, so hot meals weren't a problem either, without having to buy bags and bags of charcoal. There was certainly enough firewood around, if a bit green. So, I had good water (well pump filled the tanks when the generator ran), my food stores weren't going bad, and I was able to cook them properly (if a little inexpertly). Plus lights and the ability to connect to the internet whenever the generator was running. Extremely lucky.
As for damage... the side of the pool got blown in, probably only because it was empty at the time due to a hole in the liner. 4 trees in the horse pasture fell on the fence, but didn't actually break anything, just pushed the wire down and came to rest on the wood bits. Another tree in the middle of the pasture fell over, but not on top of anything. No buildings or living things were damaged in any way. Not even a shingle off a roof.
I haven't been paying all that much attention to what the storm did after it passed me, it looks like maybe the worst of the actual damage is going to be in places a bit north of where hurricanes usually do serious damage?
Like within the last 24 hours. I understand there are still quite a few people without power and / or water around these parts.
But I was pretty lucky. I'm on the second floor and a tree fell on my house in April so I had nothing left to fall on it now.
My biggest gripe is with JCP&L (power company) not communicating with us in a more meaningful fashion. I also believe that the wires that they service are hardly maintained at the best of times and if they had a proper maintenance plan, a lot of this prolonged outage for their "customers" could have been prevented. Obviously, there was flooding and tree damage that would have not been preventable unless they employ precogs. But some of these other downed lines and poles were a result of ignoring previous requests for service prior to the storm.
But like I said, I was very lucky to have only lost power and water (plus I had somewhere to stay.) I find it slightly irritating the disconnect even between neighborhoods on this. Everyone in my place was bitching up a storm (and, of course, I was not happy) but literally half a mile away people were flooded up to their first floor and higher.
(Obviously recognizing that even "typical hurricane damage" is a tragedy in itself and sucks massively for all involved.)
I don't know for certain, but I think the flooding I'm seeing in the NE is closer to what I'd expect from a stronger storm, though. I don't know enough about weather / geology / whatever to know why that would happen, but that's pretty much the only bit that seems particularly unusual to me.
Also, Bachman is an evil bitch.
Terrain can make flooding worse. When you have a town located in a valley, all the rain from miles around heads right toward it. Most places hurricanes hit are pretty flat. Water isn't as likely to end up traveling quickly or so much of it gathering in a small area.
This is more damage than I would typically associate with a low category 2.
Irene was large in terms of hurricane diameter. As seen here:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GGXWDvndKek/TllzvmBnoUI/AAAAAAAABhY/ll9HrIBUz68/s1600/hurricane-irene-landfall-east-coast-goes-13-aug-27.jpg
and
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-taTnsbMfZlg/TlhuW07CoNI/AAAAAAAABhI/qzTXXl9zgmQ/s1600/Irene.jpg
Magically move her so that the eye is over a midwest location and you can see that the outer bands would affect roughly 40% of the continental U.S.
Her strength wasn't overpowering in terms of wind velocity, but she was a slow moving hurricane (moving as slow as 11 mph) and heavy in terms of rainfall. My town which is 45 mins NW of NYC got 10+ inches of rain...and we've already had a freakishly bad month in terms of rainfall. Before the Hurricane the NYC regional area had already shattered monthly rainfall records by as much as 50% locally. The ground was saturated in many places, and tree roots were already somewhat movable, so when the wind hit...
I lived in NJ for many years so I can tell you that it's no surprise that a good deal of the state flooded. There are hundreds of little rivers and tributaries that criscross the state, it's just that nobody really sees them. The Ramapo and Passaic rivers have a reputation for flooding every year, and there are just so many houses crammed in the state that it's not a surprise to see floods.
The NY/NJ area gets hit by hurricane remnants often enough to deal with the rain in most cases. It's just that they're never very serious by the time they hit. Ask most NYers and they'll tell you that they remember playing outside during hurricanes when they were younger (I do).
It was a combination of factors, really. A lot of people have suffered damage but we're fortunate that the winds weren't category 2 or 3 when they got here. At that point you're talking skyscraper damage as well as the type of damage we already got.